Research & Projects

This project is financially supported by NIH and NSF, it is a collaborative research project based upon community academic network mobilized to increase awareness about brain health and Alzheimer’s Disease and related dementia among African Americans/Black adults 45 years and older, more info can be found on the project's website https://care.iu.edu/index.html

Objectives

Designing a technological solution with and for African American/Black populations in the U.S. to enhance their health literacy regarding ADRD and brain health, as well as to increase their participation in ADRD-related clinical research.​

Results

We found that technologies in order to be adopted by this population must be culturally and locally relevant, leveraging  pre-existing info-structure and networks. 

Publications

if you want to learn more about this project, please take a look at our publication on this:

 I don’t see anything specifically about Black/African Americans.”Testing an Alzheimer-specific generative AI tool tailored for African American/Black communities. Designing a multimodal and culturally relevant ADRD generative AI tool for Black American informal caregivers: A cognitive walk-through usability study Testing 3 Modalities (Voice Assistant, Chatbot, and Mobile App) to Assist Older African American and Black Adults in Seeking Information on Alzheimer Disease and Related Dementias: Wizard of Oz Usability Study 

This research is part of a long project on understanding the intersection between abortion access and digital technologies by uncovering the use of digital technologies to seek an abortion, both in self managed setting and in-clinic setting

Objectives

This project has the ultimate goal of improving abortion care through the use of digital technologies, expanding then the conceptualization of abortion simply to terminating a pregancy adopting a more holistic approach to abortion and reproductive care 

Results

By running a design workshop with 16 participants,  9 coming from a social context with restrictive abortion access and 7 coming from a social context wherein abortion is legal and accessible, we found that they had very different ideas of the role that digital technologies should play in fostering access to abortion care; envisioning in one case technology as part of a larger network of care and in the other case envisioning technology as a tool behaving outside of laws and regulations

This project is closely tied to the previous one as it expands this notion of the role of digital technologies in reproductive care and access by focusing mainly on digital technologies used for contraception and birth control

Objectives

The primary objective of the study is uncovering people's usage of digital technologies for contraception, by emphasizing how much adverse consequences might play a role in impacting their perceived trust, accuracy and effectiveness. 

Results

We have observed how people perceive digital technologies for birth control and contraception very differently according to their own social, religious and education context and according to to their ultimate goal emerged from the technology.